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Abstract
Historically, schools have been organized and managed through a deficits based approach. Oftentimes the organization looks at what is going wrong within that organization and attempts to find the solutions to fix those problems. Auginis, Gottfredson and Joo (2012) work supports this claim as they found that organizations that provided feedback from a deficits based approach sought to quickly to solve a problem and did not have the capacity to deal with the problem long-term. Spreitzer (2006) argued that when organizations focus on strengths based feedback that it often stimulates growth and energizes the developmental process of the organization.
Even prior to the legislation of No Child Left Behind in 2002, organizations made student weakness the focal point of educational reform. Mehta and Datnow (2020) would have characterized this state of education as the "yawning gap". Mehata and Datnow (2020) argued that there are five attributes that youth need in order for positive development to occur in our schools and none of them are centered around a deficits based approach.
Those five attributes are; strong connections to adults and peers, to be viewed in asset based ways, for their identities to be valued, the opportunity to contribute to the world and for opportunities to do work that has purpose and meaning. Although many of our organizations still operate, manage and lead their institutions through a "yawning gap", Fullan and Pinchot (2018) determined that when schools and districts have strong spirits and focused collaborative cultures that they do a much better job of dealing with any type of disruption and ultimately can transform their organization through an appreciative approach. Fullan and Pinchot (2018) identified that the biggest factor to this transformational change was strong teacher collaboration. This qualitative study will support and expand upon the research and evidence of what structures and strategies make a collaborative group highly effective in a strength based and appreciative setting?